Research Technician Nederlands Herseninstituut

The Netherlands Brain Bank (NBB) is a department of the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience (NIN). The NBB provides post-mortem human brain tissue obtained from donors to researchers worldwide. The NBB is driven by a dedicated team of 18 employees, and close collaboration with four pathologists and mortuary assistants at the Amsterdam UMC, and with a team of 10 on-call autopsy professionals who perform autopsies during evenings and weekends.

The NBB is also part of the Institute for Chemical Neuroscience (iCNS), a consortium which aims to discover molecular changes in the human brain underlying psychiatric symptoms, such as depression, anxiety, and psychosis. Ultimately, the interdisciplinary research from iCNS will lead to a molecular “brain atlas” of psychiatric symptoms and to new leads and approaches to improve the future diagnosis, prognosis and possible treatment of psychiatric disorders.

The NBB provides well-documented human brain tissue to researchers within iCNS. To support this work we are looking for a research technician who will be responsible for cryosectioning tissues from several brain regions for downstream molecular and imaging analyses within the iCNS consortium.

What will you be doing
Your main tasks include; cryosectioning frozen human brain tissue, preparing tissue sections for downstream applications such as molecular analyses and imaging, organizing and storing samples in freezers, recording all tissue handling activities in the tracking database, helping to maintain quality control of tissue processing workflows, assisting with sample shipment processes and assisting with brain dissection and autopsy procedures.

PhD Position: Health Demography at NIDI-KNAW

Over the past century, people around the world have experienced momentous improvements in health and in life expectancy. Whether improvements in health will continue is unclear, however, as several countries have seen plateauing or even declining life expectancy in recent decades. The overarching research program (SEHealth) develops new directions to improving population health by elucidating the origins and accumulation of chronic diseases; this PhD project will focus on living environments. Indeed, much of the variation in health is attributable to living environments. The exposome is expected to be important in cardiometabolic health trajectories include climate risks such as pollutants, extreme temperatures, and access to green spaces. Emerging factors related to climate change and environmental degradation, such as microplastics and organic pollutants, have plausible causal pathways to cardiometabolic diseases and require study. Health-related behaviours connected to climate-related issues may also be important. Adding further complexity, social inequalities in climate- and pollution-related exposures likely contribute to inequalities in health.

The focus of the PhD project will be to establish, using population-based data and novel methodology, how climate change relates to disease onset and whether green transitions can improve health. The PhD scholar will use a newly developed data infrastructure from the SoGreen Project, with population-representative major European datasets (eg. GGP, SHARE, ESS, Lifelines). The project will leverage health indicators across the lifespan, geo-spatial data on climate, and individual engagement with green transitions behaviours.

What you will be doing
In this four year project, you will:

• Carry out cutting-edge academic research within an international team of researchers.
• Publish national and international journal articles, resulting in a PhD thesis.
• Participate in, and present at (inter-)national scientific meetings• Contribute to the project, including dissemination and communication activities aimed at policymakers, stakeholders, and the general public.

PhD student - Hubrecht Institute - Utrecht

We are looking for PhD student in the group of Dr. Francesca Mattiroli at the Hubrecht Institute.

Research Assistant NIOO Collection

In this position, you will work on the documentation, duplication and characterization of our bacterial culture collection. You will be responsible for:

• Collection and Freezer Management: Maintaining and organizing our collection of microbes, plants, and databases (including Biolomics), ensuring clear and reliable storage.
• Project and Research Support: Assisting with ongoing experiments and research activities, providing both technical and organizational support.
• Analysis, reporting and presentation of obtained results
• Supervision of students

Postdoc Bioinformatics - NIOO-KNAW - Wageningen

In this position, you will design a database to catalogue and analyse a large bacterial culture collection to discover new microbial gene clusters and functional traits. You will be responsible for:

• Catalogue and integrate the curated bacterialollection and associated metadata in a dedicated database to make the collection and metadata FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, re-usable) and available for automated querying.
• Mine the genomes and metadata of the collection by diverse bioinformatic tools and pipelines (e.g., MIBiG, antiSMASH, dbCAN, bacLife, …) and perform multivariate statistics and machine learning to connect genomic traits to biological activities.
• Supervise/mentor MSc and PhD students as well as the research assistant appointed on this project.
• Report and publish obtained results from the bioinformatic analyses.